Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to
be still before God.
Opening Prayer: Lord God, give me open hands and not clenched
fists as I walk with you and for you in the midst of this day— that I might be able
to live with a true sense of freedom from the need to grasp desperately for
love and value from those I come into contact with. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.
Scripture Reading for the Day: Matthew 6:19-34
Reading for Reflection:
Greed is often associated
with a ravenous appetite that devours anything within reach—a noisy, uncouth
vice. Yet it is more often known in the
quietly insistent urge that nudges us from wanting to “needing,” then to
grasping what we now “need” so others cannot deprive us of it. Jesus addressed this grasping, clinging mind
when he counseled that we cannot serve God and mammon, and Aramaic word
denoting ill-gotten gain (Matthew 6:24).
“In your minds you must be the same as
Jesus Christ: His state was divine, yet he did not cling to his equality with
God…” (Phil.2:6, JB). The spiritual life
is one in which we grow out of the grasping, clinging mind into the mind of
Christ. The Christ-mind releases us from
our compulsion to associate personal worth with what we have accumulated,
taming what nineteenth-century professor Adolphe Gratry calls “the exuberant
desire to rise by a borrowed power.” (Editor’s Introduction by John S.
Mogabgab, Weavings, November/ December 2005)
Reflection and Listening: silent and written
Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself
Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself
Closing Prayer: O Christ my Lord, who for my sake and my brethren’s didst forgo all earthly comfort and fullness, forbid it that I should ever again live unto myself. Amen. A Diary of Private Prayer by John Baillie)
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